A Find Art

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday January 14, 2006

Helen Bradley

Thanks to a range of free tools, searching your PC can be quick and smart, writes Helen Bradley.

Let's face it, the Search tool in Windows XP Search sucks - big time. It is clunky, slow and, worst of all, it often doesn't find files that you know are on your computer. When you're ready to find out how fast and how smart searching can be, try one of the new breed of Desktop searches. There are plenty of them and most are free.

The benefit of a good search tool is that it will search more than file names - most can search inside files and inside Outlook and Outlook Express mail folders. So you can, for example, find Outlook emails or a file containing a company name.

One of the free tools is Microsoft Desktop Search, which you can download from desktop.msn.com. Once you install it, allow it time to index your computer - this process builds a data file with details of all the files you have, and this is what is used later to find quickly what you're looking for.

If possible and if you have a lot of files, leave the computer idle for a few hours to give it time to finish indexing. Until the indexing is complete, you can't be sure that a search will find all the matching documents. Once the index is built, the program keeps the index up-to-date and you'll notice the icon in the system tray is animated when the index is being updated.

By default, the Desktop Search indexes your My Documents folder and Outlook and Outlook Express email. To add other locations to the index so you can search them, right click the system tray icon and choose Desktop Search Options, Desktop Search and select Custom folders and email locations. Click Browse and add other locations to include in the index. Click Rebuild Index to include your newly selected locations.

To search for an item, click in the Search Desktop bar on your task bar, type the information you want to search for and click the Green arrow. This opens the main Search Results dialog and you can see all the items that match your search. To display only emails, for example, click the E-mail button and everything else will be hidden. Each item is displayed with its title, folder or location on your disk, author and date of creation. You can click any item to view it in the preview window so you can check to see if it is the item you're interested in.

One big benefit of the preview is the ability to see a PDF file and to move from page to page inside it without having to launch a PDF viewer. You can also select and copy a portion of a file from this dialog. To open the item, double click it and it will open in the program associated with its extension.

You may notice as you type the words to search for that a small dialog pops up displaying some search results - this is because the search starts as soon as you start typing. These summarised results are grouped into document types and, where there are too many to show, there is a "more" link to click to see more of the matches in this category.

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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